OpenMW FAQ #2

[WeirdSexy]

This should deal with common feature requests and post v1.0 development.

I'll start off with the list I have. Feel free to post suggestions for additional Q's. I haven't started answers for any of these because some of them are of a technical nature and I would be pulling answers out of my ass or giving my personal opinion rather than the opinion of the team. In other words, use this thread to help me write the answers.

Q: Will there be Multiplayer?
A: [I'll need to explain why this is difficult to just "tack on" to an engine that wasn't designed for it. Also, if we say that it is unlikely we will be implementing multiplayer, someone will say "The modding community can make it as a mod for OpenMW later, duh". Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no way this could be done, right? I'd have to explain to them that the multiplayer people would have to make a fork of OpenMW and maintain it separately if we didn't want to support that in our engine, right?]

Q: Will you support other games in the future?
A: [Probably something like: "No."]

Q: Are you going to fix the Combat?
A: [Probably something like: "We are not planning on mimicking Skyrim's combat system, no. But, we might do away with the dice roll." I have no idea if we are planning on doing anything here, though, so help me out.]

Q: Are you going to implement everything from Morrowind Code Patch, MGE, etc?
A: [The obvious answer is "No, not everything." But what else should I say?]

Q: Why not just remake Morrowind as a Total Conversion for Skyrim?
A: [No cross-platform support, no open-source benefits, everyone would have to own Skyrim to play it, it would still be buggy, wouldn't support existing Morrowind mods, and most importantly, we would have to recreate all of Morrowind's art assets, build the world by hand, recreate all the quests by hand, and either mod in some sort of dialogue box or assemble a large, professional team of voice actors to voice all the NPCs. What an asinine suggestion]

Q: Will it be shiny? DX 11, HDR, god rays?
A: [I suppose it would be worth it to explain that you don't get models that take advantage of hardware tessellation simply by having a Direct3D11 renderer. What else? Also, are we going to have some sort of method for loading custom shaders like MGE, or are we planning on having native implementations of the big ones people want like Depth of Field, Ambient Occlusion, God Rays, etc?]

Q: Will you implement gameplay elements the newer games?
A: [You know what these are, combat, crafting, Oblivion/Skyrim-style shield, poison weapons, etc.]

Q: Will OpenMW have multi-core support?
A: [Right now, the audio subsystem is in a seperate thread, yes? Are we planning on threading anything else, like AI or something? People are asking for OpenMW to saturate their 8 core machines "for long view distances" haha. What should I say about threading only making sense under certain circumstances and adding complexing to the code?]

Q: When will OpenMW be playable?
A: On the 16th of Last Seed

[Lazaroth]

I had a thought regarding the "Will you implement gameplay elements from the newer games?".

As I see it, there are three "categories" here:
- The first is things that are generally seen as improvements over Morrowind. This includes Oblivion-style shield, combat, mana-regen and poison weapons.
- The second is things that are controversial (some people like it, others do not), such as e.g. fast travel, compass and levelling enemies.
- The third is things that by most are considered superior in Morrowind, but might need balancing tweaks; e.g. crafting/enchanting etc.


I also came up with a question that might be interesting;
"Will you fix easily exploitable things?"
E.g. cheap training with skill drain, remove creeper/mudcrab merchant from the game and so forth.

[ElderTroll]

Q: Will there be Multiplayer?
Q: Are you going to fix the Combat?
Q: Will you implement gameplay elements the newer games?

It is worth pointing out that id (now owned by zenimax) has released many of its game engines as open source (id tec 2, 3, 4 to my knowledge and maybe more). These engines were then refined, made more stable by volunteers, sometimes radically altered, and became the basis for many different open source games (nexuiz, padworld, alien arena, ufo:ai, tremulous, overdose, dark spaces engine, etc, etc). http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... y_tree.svg We could point out how many different projects radiated out from id tec engines (and the variety of game types) to give people an idea of the possibilities, while still saying our groups mission is to refine, stabilize, and add basic and extended scripting functionality. Other people/teams can fork the project and run with it.

[Zini]

Q: Will there be Multiplayer?
A: [I'll need to explain why this is difficult to just "tack on" to an engine that wasn't designed for it. Also, if we say that it is unlikely we will be implementing multiplayer, someone will say "The modding community can make it as a mod for OpenMW later, duh". Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no way this could be done, right? I'd have to explain to them that the multiplayer people would have to make a fork of OpenMW and maintain it separately if we didn't want to support that in our engine, right?]

The situation is not that simple. It would require major structural changes. Also, there is the issue that the gameplay of MW was designed for single player. The best we could hope for would be some basic co-op play and even that would require some major pondering to get it right. But there is nothing fundamental that stops us from implementing multiplayer in OpenMW.

Still, I don't see multiplayer happen any time soon. Prior to 1.0 it is completely out of question, obviously. But I don't see it happen prior to 2.0 either, because it would disrupt the development overly. We have some large scale changes ahead of us after 1.0 anyway and that would just be too much. Also, there is the problem that none of the current developers (including me) has any interest in multiplayer at all.

Q: Will you support other games in the future?
A: [Probably something like: "No."]

More like: No way. Ever.

Q: Are you going to fix the Combat?
A: [Probably something like: "We are not planning on mimicking Skyrim's combat system, no. But, we might do away with the dice roll." I have no idea if we are planning on doing anything here, though, so help me out.]

Combat is one of the things we definitely will be de-hardcoding. We will not change the combat system. But we will empower mod developers to do so.

Q: Are you going to implement everything from Morrowind Code Patch, MGE, etc?
A: [The obvious answer is "No, not everything." But what else should I say?]

More or less everything, but not necessarily in the same way. Its a bit too early to go into details here.

Q: Will it be shiny? DX 11, HDR, god rays?
A: [I suppose it would be worth it to explain that you don't get models that take advantage of hardware tessellation simply by having a Direct3D11 renderer. What else? Also, are we going to have some sort of method for loading custom shaders like MGE, or are we planning on having native implementations of the big ones people want like Depth of Field, Ambient Occlusion, God Rays, etc?]

Once we allow the use of OGRE resources formats, content providers can use any shaders they like. Its to early to talk about post-1.0 graphics improvements in details. But considering that scrawl will most likely have a heavy go at it after 1.0, we can expect a lot.

Q: Will you implement gameplay elements the newer games?
A: [You know what these are, combat, crafting, Oblivion/Skyrim-style shield, poison weapons, etc.]

No. But we will de-hardcode the current gameplay, so that mod developers can implement these.

Q: Will OpenMW have multi-core support?
A: [Right now, the audio subsystem is in a seperate thread, yes? Are we planning on threading anything else, like AI or something? People are asking for OpenMW to saturate their 8 core machines "for long view distances" haha. What should I say about threading only making sense under certain circumstances and adding complexing to the code?]

Audio uses a separate thread. OGRE runs a couple of additional threads too, though there is pretty much no load in them yet. AI is certainly an option. We will probably make use of multi-threading for resources loading to some degree. There might be a few more opportunities, but we haven't examined them yet.

But last time I checked OpenMW was still GPU-bound on most boxes. And since the GPU is the bottleneck, making more efficient use of the CPU should not speed up the game; that is unless we add more features that require more CPU power (which is certainly true for AI).
As for long distance rendering, I don't see how using more CPU cores would help a lot here, since the work is mostly done on the GPU. We need to look into that and maybe having an additional thread or two might be an option. But using 8 cores to get 8-times the rendered area is completely unrealistic.

[HiPhish]

More like: No way. Ever.

Not even Oblivion some time past 1.0 or 2.0?

[psi29a]

More like: No way. Ever.

Not even Oblivion some time past 1.0 or 2.0?

Would be more like a fork of OpenMW to something like OpenOblivion (OO), otherwise we'd water down the OpenMW name.

[Zini]

Oblivion is sufficiently different that integrating it into OpenMW doesn't make sense. Also, Oblivion has a much smaller fan base than MW. The interest is probably much lower.

[psi29a]

Oblivion is sufficiently different that integrating it into OpenMW doesn't make sense. Also, Oblivion has a much smaller fan base than MW. The interest is probably much lower.

I'd pay to have a Linux client of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout3 and FO3: New Vegas.... however in the context of OpenMW (MW stands for morrowind), you would need to rename the project to be more inclusive. It just doesn't make any sense. It however does make sense to fork OpenMW as a base, though you'd likely have to re-write or throw out code.

[ElderTroll]

@brotherbrick
Maybe Bethesda could use OpenMW as a basis

@weirdsexy
After reading zini's comments I think comparing openmw to the release of id's engines is very useful. OpenMW will not be changing the actual gameplay mechanics, but we are making an engine that makes it easier for modders to change the game mechanics to their needs. OpenMW is the stable template that others can modify as much as they like with radical results (you could show). You could use one specific example of id tec engine version that led to a plethora of very different games to illustrate the possibilities.

[HiPhish]

Oblivion is sufficiently different that integrating it into OpenMW doesn't make sense. Also, Oblivion has a much smaller fan base than MW. The interest is probably much lower.

OK. To be fair, Oblivion also runs better than Morrowind, so I guess it's not that important to have a source port. I was just under the impression that since they both use the Gamebryo engine there would be enough overlap to support both eventually. Like how the XL Engine will support more than one game.